It consists of 46 titled and seven untitled short rhymes (quatrains), all considered to be in the genre of nonsense literature.

Although it was not understood at the time of its publication, many poems in Abol Tabol contain skilfully hidden satire on the state of society and administration of early 20th-century colonial India - mostly Bengal.

Bhattacharya contends that, Ray's visionary mind accompanied the poems of Abol Tabol with illustrations.

Such sketches imbibed unschooled learners to have a comprehensive understanding of the text without delving deep into the dynamics of alphabetical logarithms.

In this way, Bhattacharya, explores the multimodal aspects of the text, that transcends the liminality of a text-centred approach.

Sukumar Ray wrote for the children's magazine Sandesh, started by his father Upendrakishore, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), right from the time of its first publication in 1913.

[3] Abol Tabol, meaning The Weird and the Absurd, was originally the name designating a section within Sandesh magazine, where many of these poems were first published.

Rhymes of Whimsy - The Complete Abol Tabol, Translated by Niladri Roy, Haton Cross Press.

The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense, edited by Michael Heyman, with Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishankar.

Rhymes of Whimsy - The Complete Abol Tabol, with Analyses & Commentary by Niladri Roy, Haton Cross Press.

Routledge, 2012 The World of Sukumar Ray, by Sukanta Chaudhuri in Telling Tales: Children’s Literature in India, Ed.